Affiliate Marketing 4: Choosing A Domain Name

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There are ways to make money as an affiliate without a website. However, having your own website (or a network of websites) is generally the best approach.

In this article we’ll take a look at choosing domain names. I’ll show you some of the resources I use.

It is fairly well accepted that the domain name has an effect on the search engine ranking of a website. There is some dispute about just how much of an effect it has – the experts surveyed by SEOmoz believe that it’s the third-most important ranking factor, after the keyword being used in the title tag.

Source: SEOmoz Search Engine Ranking Factors 2009

General rules for choosing domain names are:

The shorter the better
.com is still best for international sites
If there’s any possibility that you’ll be telling someone a domain name on the phone, for example as part of an email address, make sure it’s easy to explain. No digits, no hyphens, easy to spell.

Most of the 2-letter, 3-letter and 4-letter domain names have been snapped up, but you might still be able to get a 5-letter domain name (or buy a 4-letter one for an exhorbitant price).

If possible, it makes sense to choose a domain name which contains your keyword phrase. It also makes sense to have the keyword phrase at the beginning of the domain name, rather than at the end.

One way to choose a keyword-based domain name is the “brute force” method. This involves creating a list of keyword phrases and testing them with a domain name tool. We’ll start with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

If you scroll down, you’ll find the download links – click on ‘Text’.

Save the file, then open it with Notepad.

Go through the list and delete phrases which contain brand names or which wouldn’t make sense as domain names. Select all the phrases (Ctrl+A) and press Ctrl+C to copy them to the clipboard.

Go to Moniker.com. Click on the “multiple domains” link.

You’ll need to sign up for a free account if you don’t already have one.

Click anywhere in the “Register Bulk Domains” box, then press Ctrl+V to paste your list of keywords.

Scroll down and click the “Search” button.

Moniker returns a list of available domain names (with unavailable domains listed underneath).

I can see at least a couple of possibilities in the list above.

If you don’t want to open an account with Moniker, Dotster.com has a similar bulk domain checking utility. However, it’s not as smart – you’ll have to remove the spaces within the keyword phrases.

Another useful resource is Domain Name Analyzer. This is an excellent free software program from Softnik Technologies which runs on your computer, and which helps you generate domain names. In this example, I’ve used the “Create names from templates” feature to create a list of 3-character names, starting with 2 letters and ending with a number. The program generated 6760 names, starting with aa0 and ending with zz9. DNA allows me to check the availability of each name in the list.

Perhaps more useful is DNA’s capability of creating names from keywords. You can type in a keyword and select from predefined lists of prefixes and suffixes, or add your own.

Once you’ve shortlisted a few domain names, it’s useful to check them out on a domain name appraisal site. Most of the appraisal sites like DNScoop evaluate websites, not domain names, and depend largely traffic and backlinks for their results. Obviously a brand-new domain name will have neither. That leaves us with NameBoy, which determines the value of a domain name based largely on the number of searches for the keywords in the name.

Click on “Appraisals” in the top menu: